How the Ghostbusters Remake Became the Most-Disliked Trailer on YouTube

The trenchant investigators at ScreenCrush (a web site where, for the sake of full disclosure, I am also a contributor) recently took a deep dive into the a playlist of Youtube’s most-disliked videos and came to a surprising conclusion. The top slots are a mix of Justin Bieber music videos, Miley Cyrus music videos, Nicki Minaj music videos, and dispatches from a foreign vlogger named Aruan Felix. But the first non-music video, non-vlog, non-Rick Perry campaign ad on the most disliked playlist lands at the twenty-third spot, and it’s the trailer for Paul Feig’s upcoming Ghostbusters reboot, which stars Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Leslie Jones, and Kate McKinnon.

Why? The current top comment says it all: “Please, no one go to see this. We need to make a statement.﻿”

The undercurrent of misogyny isn’t too hard to see, even if it’s not stated explicitly, and the all-female principal cast has riled up many male YouTubers since the trailer first dropped. The notion that an actor without the proper genitals would dare to star in a previously-established film property has, for some reason or another, gravely offended the denizens of YouTube.

But the real-life ramifications of the online backlash have yet to be seen. For one, the current count of 590,501 dislikes pales in comparison to the grand total of 29,553,420 views on the video, suggesting that the box-office returns won’t suffer too badly. What’s more, online-flaming campaigns such as these often involve users registering with multiple dummy accounts to artificially inflate the number of dislikes, so the previously stated figure most likely reflects a much smaller number of actual users. This hullabaloo will most likely yield the same results as the attempts to coordinate a boycott for the female-led Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which is to say, nothing. But it’s like Jean-Luc Godard once said: “The best way to criticize a movie is impotent digital fuming.”